1984

Preface By Giancarlo Rossini1984 (1948) is undoubtedly the most famous example of the vein inspired by the spectral anxieties that the two wars and the atomic h*******t had evoked. The ancient positive utopias of Bacon, More, Campanella are now re-proposed in the negative: it is the apocalyptic parable of the great Orwellian fears: totalitarianism, the falsification and loss of historical memory induced by the media, the corruption of language, the annulment of the individual identity, conveyed in a chilling description of the society of the future against which the last hero fights once again. In Orwell, the continuous man-writer overlaps pose many problems of interpretation. The characters of the first novels, in particular, suffering from excessive biographical tracing, seem to lack effective characterization and, rather than autonomous life, would live as bearers of their author's requests on particular problems. In this sense, the novels awarded with public success, “The Animal Farm” and “1984”, are considered, for various reasons, the most successful even by critics. But the lack of attention paid to Orwell's early works also stemmed from publication difficulties. “Burmese days” came out years late due to state censorship; “Homage to Catalonia”, he struggled not a little to find a publisher willing to take a risk on such a poorly aligned interpretation of the civil war. The same “Animal Farm”, an amazing 11 million copies bestseller, finished in '44, happened badly, just when England needed its powerful Soviet ally the most, and had to wait a year for publication. In Russia, then, only with glasnost was it removed from the index of prohibited books. Editorial vicissitudes that confirm Orwell's reputation as an "uncomfortable" author. The anxiety for the truth, the impartiality of judgment pursued almost to the point of mania, intellectual honesty, which find their most vivid expression in “Homage to Catalonia”, a book re-evaluated by modern historiographical criticism and considered one of the most lucid on the subject , almost constantly give a character of denunciation to his work. The inexhaustible polemical verve that made Orwell an implacable and masterful pamphleter in his essays and articles cost him, literally and politically, his isolation. From the intelligentsia of the 1930s, from the Audens and Spenders with whom he had shared the Spanish experience, he is separated by his indispensable critical spirit of Marxism. The arrows invariably aimed against a literature enslaved to orthodoxy invest an entire generation of intellectual engagées , of " effeminate poets " corrupted by the gregarious spirit and entangled in the cult of Russia. His denunciation of the totalitarian opposites saw him disliked by the right and the left and often exploited by both. The insistence with which 36 onwards turned against the communist regime tends to make people forget that Orwell always defined himself as a socialist. Of course, his socialism, as he was placing it on the hinges of "justice" and "freedom", could not be identified with real socialism. His ideal society, rather than the doctrine of historical materialism, seems to be inspired by a moral primacy, which contemplates decorum, respect for human dignity, tolerance, a broad concept of decency, in short, extended to all classes. A model on whose actual possibility of realization the pessimism of 1984 poses a serious mortgage. Orwell's catastrophic universe is, in fact, only the precipitate of all those negative tendencies that he already sees in his time. According to the hallmark of anti-utopian literature, for the writer the future is already present, by the time he writes the degeneration process has already started, massification has already begun to corrode individual and social destiny. The urgency of the warning is dramatized in Orwell by the proximity of the projection: not a distant future of the next millennium where, instead, the other champions of the negative eschatology of the 1900s are set, therefore a reading that insists on the aspect "Prophetic" of 1984 (1948), the inevitable apogee of the monumental celebrations that were promoted by the media at the stroke of the Orwellian date, risks being misleading.